Woodland Cemetery

Woodland is Des Moines's oldest cemetery — older than the city. Five farmers donated the first five and a half acres in 1848, two years after Iowa statehood and three years before Fort Des Moines incorporated; the first burial, in 1850, was Thomas Casady, infant son of the pioneer judge who now lies there too. Modeled on the garden-cemetery movement, its oak-covered hills served as the young city's first park — the place residents strolled before Des Moines had parks to stroll in.

The cemetery's rules were the prairie's promise: anyone could be buried at Woodland regardless of race, religion, or income — and the graves show it. Civil War dead lie here Black and white, Union and Confederate, side by side; soldiers from the War of 1812 to Vietnam; the founders of Drake University and Des Moines University; a Supreme Court justice; the Younkers and Tones who built the city's business district. It's also a Network to Freedom site — the cemetery as evidence of a city that buried its dead without the era's usual exclusions.

Eighty thousand graves fill sixty-nine acres now — the City Receiving Vault that held winter's dead until the ground thawed, the Odd Fellows and Jewish and Catholic sections folded in over the years, volunteers still resetting the monuments and laying the December wreaths.

Woodland is the archive's first-park file — the 1848 garden cemetery that predates Des Moines, buried everyone regardless of race or creed, and holds the founders and the forgotten of the capital city it watched grow.